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Well, it's hard not to be intrigued by this. It's a 3D printer that makes a bunch of its own parts. And I gather that the rest of the stuff are things that can be found, relatively speaking, off the shelf.

If we're going to live without fossil fuel (and, let's face, we are going to live without, or very nearly without), then one thing we have to strive for is products that last a lot longer. Particularly, they have to be reparable. Some things are designed to be reparable, but most these days aren't. It makes me awfully happy when I run across something that I can indeed fix with a suitable replacement part (and extra points if it can be fixed with improvised parts).

Two or three products have crossed my desk of late and they're all headed in a direction I think makes a lot of sense, both from a sustainability and a disaster preparedness point of view (not to mention that these things could make mobile computing a lot easier). I'll talk about the one that's available now in this entry, plus cover the general concept. We'll tackle the other two (plus one outlier) on later days.

If you've been thinking to yourself, watching the news of late, that it's really not cool for the government to monitor *everyone's* phone calls and email, because we really didn't sign on for a surveillance state, you have a few options and this entry I thought I'd look at just one of them (well, it's actually two utilities, but the work hand in glove).